Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Does No. 10 really have a plan for social care?

(Photo: Number 10)

Is the government ever going to reform social care? After a lengthy row between No. 10 and the Treasury, the Queen’s speech does include a promise that ‘proposals on social care reform will be brought forward.’ The stand-off wasn’t just over how much those proposals will cost, but the design itself. Perhaps this is why the briefing accompanying the speech is so very light on what the government plans to do.

All we know is that the Health and Care Bill ‘will include provisions to improve the oversight of how social care is commissioned and delivered, and facilitate greater integration between health and care services by placing Integrated Care Systems on a statutory footing across the UK, putting more power and autonomy in the hands of local systems.’ This isn’t a surprise: this NHS-related legislation has been on the cards for a while.

But when it comes to the detail of reform for the funding of social care provision, there is still no more detail than ‘the government is committed to improving the adult social care system and will bring forward proposals in 2021.’ Perhaps more ominously, the briefing also says ‘more widely, we will continue to work with local and national partners to ensure our approach to reform is informed by diverse perspectives, including those with lived experience of the care sector.’ This sentence sounds like the sort of thing no one could disagree with, given it is indeed important to listen to people who understand what it’s like to be in the care sector.

The words ‘cross-party support’ strike fear into those who understand the dynamics of social care reform

But it suggests that ministers haven’t done much listening to people in the sector up to this point: talk to anyone who works in this area and they will huff impatiently that everyone knows what the issues are, that politicians have spent more than ten years asking about their ‘lived experience’ and the issue is not listening but doing.

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